July212014

Every black child in grade school is taught Adolph Hitler killed six million Jews and is the worst human being that ever lived. On the other hand our children are taught “The Right Honorable” Cecil Rhodes the founder of the De Beer diamond company in South Africa who killed ten times that number of Africans is a hero and a statesman and if they study hard and do well in school they may be eligible to win Rhodes Scholarships the oldest and most celebrated international fellowship awards in the world. They don’t mention the scholarships are paid for with the blood of their ancestors.

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// oAnth 2014-07-21

IMHO it depends too much on the context, by which you might feel yourself compelled to use those
comparisons of atrocities, whether such a confrontation of disgusting
characters is insightful or just horribly misleading - be aware, for it would most
likely end as a rhetoric gate opener to revanchism.

July102014

Shir
Hever is an economic researcher in the Alternative Information Center, a
Palestinian-Israeli organization active in Jerusalem and Beit-Sahour.
Hever researches the economic aspect of the Israeli occupation of the
Palestinian territory, some of his research topics include the
international aid to the Palestinians and to Israel, the effects of the
Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories on the Israeli
economy, and the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns against
Israel. His work also includes giving lectures and presentations on the
economy of the occupation. He is a graduate student at the Freie
Universitat in Berlin, and researches the privatization of security in
Israel. His first book: Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation:
Repression Beyond Exploitation, was published by Pluto Press.

[...]

HEVER:
I was born in Jerusalem, and I was born into a lefty household, a
critical household. And the most important thing that I think my parents
taught me and raised me with is this idea that I have to be aware of my
own privileges and to take responsibility for them, because Israeli
society is extremely divided and extremely hierarchical, and I am lucky
to have been born male, white, Jewish, Ashkenazi, so in all of these
categories in which I had an advantage, and my parents told me this is
an unfair advantage.

[...]

JAY: Now, just because it’s an
interesting kind of historical note, there’s kind of two types of
Zionist fascists. There are Zionists who are simply very aggressive
against Palestinians and people called them fascists, and then there are
Zionists who loved Mussolini.

HEVER: Yeah, I’m talking about the
second kind. I’m talking about real—people who really adopt this kind of
Zionist—or this kind of fascist ideology that the state is above
everything, and that we all have to conform to a certain idea, and that
we should find our great leader. So that kind of Zionism is not
mainstream, actually, and it’s not in power. In many demonstrations that
I had the chance to go to, people tend to shout that fascism will not
pass.But, of course, when you look at it from a more academic point of
view, there’s a difference between fascism and other kinds of repressive
regimes, and I would say Israel is a colonial regime, a colonialist
regime, in which there’s apartheid, there’s very deep entrenched
repression.

But in a colonialist system there’s always fear. And you grow up with this fear also. You always know—.

JAY: Did you?

HEVER:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, when I would go to certain areas or when I took a
taxi with a Palestinian driver, then even my closest family would get
nervous about it. And then it made me wonder: how come you taught me
that everybody’s equal but you’re still afraid of Palestinians?

[...]

(M)y
close family, my immediate family, they were very supportive of my
opinions. And we had many political debates at home—sometimes arguments,
but in the end I think for the outsider it doesn’t seem like we’re that
much far apart. When you go a little bit further to the extended
family, then that’s a whole different story. And most of the family on
my mother’s side stopped speaking with me after I decided not to go to
the army. And so, yeah, my mother’s parents, who were fighters in the
Palmach, they had a completely different worldview and a very Zionist
right-wing perspective in which they believe that all of these policies
against Palestinians were completely justified.

JAY: And your
grandparents, were any of them—when did they come to Israel? Did you
have direct family that were killed during World War II?

HEVER:
Yeah. So this is actually the exact—the interesting intersection of two
stories, because my mother’s side of the family came to Palestine before
the Holocaust, before the Second World War, and participated in the
Nakba against Palestinians. And my father’s family—.

JAY: So they came during the ’30s or ’20s?

HEVER:
Yeah, over some time, but yeah. And my father’s family came right after
the war. They escaped from the Nazis in Poland. And the vast majority
of the family in Poland was exterminated by the Nazis. So they escaped
to the Soviet Union, where they lived pretty harsh years during the war.
And then the family scattered again, and that part of the family that
chose to go to Palestine, to Israel, happened to be my side of the
family.

[...]

HEVER: That is a concept called Hebrew labor,
and it was done very openly and without shame because there was at that
point of time no concept that such structural and comprehensive racism
against a particular group of people is something that Jews should also
be worried about. I mean, it wasn’t something that was even in people’s
minds so much, because Palestinians were part of the scenery, part of
the background, and not treated as the native inhabitants of Palestine.
But it has to be said also that during those fights it wasn’t—even
though it was a colonial situation, in which Zionists were supported by
foreign powers in coming and colonizing Palestine, it wasn’t clear if
they were going to succeed or not, and it wasn’t clear until 1948
whether they would succeed or not. So from the personal stories of these
people, they saw themselves as heroes or as overcoming a great
adversity, and not as people who had all their options and decided that
here’s a little piece of land that we want to add to our collection.
From their point of view, this was their chance to have their own piece
of land, and when looking at the colonial powers, the European colonial
powers operating all of the world, they didn’t think that what they were
doing was so strange or peculiar.

[...]

HEVER: And during
the ’90s there was—the Oslo process began. There was a coalition between
Yitzhak Rabin from the Labor Party and Meretz, which was the part that
they supported. Meretz was the liberal party for human rights, but still
a Zionist party. And this coalition started to negotiate with Yasser
Arafat and to start the Oslo process. But at the same time, they would
implement these policies that were just completely undemocratic and—for
example, to take 400 people who were suspected of being members of the
Hamas Party without a trial and just deport them. And at that point my
parents had a kind of crisis of faith and they decided not to support
his party anymore. And I would say this is the moment where Zionism was
no longer accepted.

[...]

HEVER: I think the moment that I
made that choice is actually much later, because it’s possible to have
all these opinions but still play the game and go to any regular career
path. But after I decided not to go into the army and after I decided to
go to university, in the university I experienced something that
changed my mind.

JAY: But back up one moment. You decide not to go into the army. (...) That’s a big decision in Israel.

HEVER:
Well, I was again lucky to be in this very interesting time period
where Netanyahu just became prime minister, and he was being very
bombastic about his announcements, and a lot of people started doubting
the good sense of going into the army. So it was a time where it was
relatively easy to get out. At first I thought, I will go into the army,
because I went to a very militaristic school. My school was very proud
of all the intelligence officers that used to come out of it. So I
thought, okay, I don’t want to be an occupier, I don’t want to be a
combat soldier in the occupied territory, but if I’ll find some some
kind of loophole that I can be a teacher or do some kind of noncombat
work for the army, I’ll do that.

[...]

And I used to support
the Oslo process, because I used to read the Israeli newspapers, and it
seemed like Israel is being very generous and willing to negotiate,
when in fact—. But my mother, I said that she was working for the
government. She would bring me some documents about the Oslo process,
and there I would be able to read about the water allocation and about
land allocation and say, well, this is certainly not a fair kind of
negotiation. But then, when the Second Intifada started, it was
repressed with extreme violence by the Israeli military, by the Israeli
police. And that was also a moment in which I felt that even living in
Israel is becoming unbearable for me. But there’s always kind of the
worry, is it going to get to the next step? I think this immediate
tendency to compare it with the ’30s in Germany is because it’s a Jewish
society.

The
Palmach (Hebrew: פלמ"ח, acronym for Plugot Maḥatz (Hebrew: פלוגות מחץ),
lit. “strike forces”) was the elite fighting force of the Haganah, the
underground army of the Yishuv (Jewish community) during the period of
the British Mandate for Palestine. The Palmach was established on 15 May
1941. By the outbreak of the Israeli War for Independence in 1948 it
consisted of over 2,000 men and women in three fighting brigades and
auxiliary aerial, naval and intelligence units. With the creation of
Israel’s army, the three Palmach Brigades were disbanded. This and
political reasons led to many of the senior Palmach officers resigning
in 1950.

Meretz
defines itself as a Zionist, left-wing, social-democratic party. The
party is a member of the Socialist International and an observer member
of the Party of European Socialists. It sees itself as the political
representative of the Israeli Peace movement in the Knesset – as well as
municipal councils and other local political bodies.In the
international media it has been described as left-wing,
social-democratic, dovish, secular, civil libertarian, and
anti-occupation.

"Hebrew
labor" is often also referred to as “Jewish labor” although the former
is the literal translation of “avoda ivrit”. According to Even-Zohar the
immigrants of the Second Aliyah preferred to use the word “Hebrew”
because they wanted to emphasize the difference between their “new
Hebrew” identity and the “old Diaspora Jewish” identity. For them the
word “Hebrew” had romantic connotations with the “purity” and
“authenticity” of the existence of the “Hebrew nation in its land”, like
it had been in the past.

Related to the concept of “Hebrew labor” was the concept of “alien
labor”. Ben-Gurion wrote about the settlers of the First Aliyah: “They
introduced the idol of exile to the temple of national rebirth, and the
creation of the new homeland was desecrated by avodah zara”. According
to Shapira avodah zara means both “alien labor” and, in a religious
sense, “idol worship”. Along with bloodshed and incest this is one of
the three worst sins in Judaism. Application of this concept to the
employment of Arab workers by Jews depicted this as a taboo.

May042014

From this post, (which I didn't repost actively from my friends' timeline), was caused a posting loop of 165 reposts to my account. This happened to me already some time ago (see the entry - in DE - from 2013-01-05) on soup.io. I apologize the inconveniences.